Another Pacemaker device mix from Finland, this time a lot longer and a lot less polished but its got a certain charm which I quite enjoy. Note the Helsinki scorching remixes, as it would be rude not to play it in Helsinki. Theres quite a few classics in this mix and they still sound good.

Can’t even tell you how many mixes I have done over the last few trips but I’m slowly picking out the good ones and uploading them to my Mixcloud account.

I really enjoyed doing this mix on my pacemaker while enjoying a coffee near the Amos Rex, and happened to capture the scene of space intruders (really models dressed up in space clothes) climbing over the outside. Its a short one and you will see intruder by Armin vs MIKE is in there twice, as it was fitting with the stampede of space intruders.

This year, ideas from Mozilla’s first full-length Internet Health Report — a deep look at how the Internet and human life intersect — are at the heart of the festival. At MozFest 2018, we’ll strategize our next moves in global campaigns for net neutrality, data privacy, and online freedom. We’ll advance thinking on topics like ethical AI and common-sense tech policy. We’ll collaborate on code, on art and practical ideas, creating seeds for the next great open-source products.

If I had some money from all the people who sent me details of Tim Burners-Lee’s Solid I would have enough to buy a cheap flight to somewhere in Europe with a cheap airline.

Solid is meant to change “the current model where users have to hand over personal data to digital giants in exchange for perceived value. As we’ve all discovered, this hasn’t been in our best interests. Solid is how we evolve the web in order to restore balance – by giving every one of us complete control over data, personal or not, in a revolutionary way.”

Solid isn’t a radical new program. Instead, “Solid is a set of modular specifications, which build on, and extend the founding technology of the world wide web (HTTP, REST, HTML). They are 100% backwards compatible with the existing web.

The comparisons between Solid and Databox have been asked by many and I would certainly say Databox (regardless of its name) isn’t a place to hold all your personal data. You could use it like that but its more of a privacy aware data processing platform/unit. I remember the first time I heard about Vendor relationship management (VRM), it was clear to me how powerful this could be for many things. But then again I also identified Data portability as something essential while most people just didn’t see the point.

Everything will live or die by not just developer support, privacy controls, security, cleverness, but by user demand… and it feels like personal data stores still a while off in most peoples imagination.

Maybe once enough people personally experience the rough side of personal data breaches it may change?

In July 2018, the sales engagement startup Apollo left a database containing billions of data points publicly exposed without a password. The data was discovered by security researcher Vinny Troia who subsequently sent a subset of the data containing 126 million unique email addresses to Have I Been Pwned. The data left exposed by Apollo was used in their “revenue acceleration platform” and included personal information such as names and email addresses as well as professional information including places of employment, the roles people hold and where they’re located. Apollo stressed that the exposed data did not include sensitive information such as passwords, social security numbers or financial data.

Till this is a everyday occurrence, most people will just carry on and not care? Maybe theres even a point it should be part of the furniture of the web, like the new grey?

Its been a while since I reinstalled my work laptop; one thing I haven’t reinstalled properly is the Slack app.

The amount of times I use to start it up and go and make a tea because it would make my ubuntu install act like Windows 95. Most of the time I would come back to find my laptop completely frozen.

I tried removing the amount of slack workspaces I had attached to the app but it made little difference. So I decided to hell with the slack app, which seems to be a wrapper for Chrome, with each slack instance being another instance of chrome!

This time I’m using Slack in Firefox and limiting how many I have open at a time. I noticed if you login into the different slacks, the cookie will hold them open for you without using the resources. This can be done from the main page using the Workspace options.

I also noticed the enterprise slack version also has a front page which can be used to reach the other slacks.

Recently I decided to give Flatpak Slack a try. Interestingly I found you can launch the Slack app from the slack pages mentioned above.

It sounds like a lot of hassle but it works and mean my ubuntu system is fully useable.

I know the word for peanut in Spanish, German, Italian, Greek and Icelandic. When I lived in Beijing for two years, the first sentence I learned to master in Mandarin was, “If I eat peanuts, I will die.” Then, to really get the message across, I would mime death. I’d clutch my throat, roll my eyes back and stick my tongue out. My audience, usually Chinese waiters, would laugh or look bewildered, but it was the most effective way to get the point across. It was blunt, but it had to be. I had a severe peanut allergy and I struggled to convey the gravity of the situation to locals in China, where nut allergies are rare.

Why paper? Because its something I can give to the wait staff to give to the actual kitchen instead of relying on the wait staff to convey all the allergies I have. One can be easily missed and all hell is unleashed into my body.

At dinner on my first night in Beijing, I told the waiter, “I’m allergic to peanuts. I don’t want peanuts.” He brought over my food and I peered into a dish, which was sprinkled in peanuts. “Peanuts?” I asked, pointing, knowing they were peanuts. He glanced at the dish and said, “Just a little.”

“Just a little” is the difference between alive and dead. Between the best holiday ever and an emergency trip to the hospital.

Now to be fair I’ve been told a few times especially in Japan, go away (more or less) but having to sign a wavier just makes my blood boil.

I’ve learned a few survival strategies along the way, though some of them I learned the hard way.

Friends who travel with me know that they must be my designated “tasters”. Most often, this task is left to my poor husband. So many holidays, so many memories, and so many moments of me shouting in his face, “Do you taste peanuts? Do you?!” A curry on a beach in Malaysia, hot pot in Chengdu, a baklava on a balcony in Greece, all with me staring at him intently, praying for the green light.

I have similar starting with the allergy card, ask friends, a touch to the lips and then a nibble. Wait for 3-5mins with water and antihistamines at the ready. I tend to eat between 2-5 depending on how certain I’ve eaten something allergic. I never leave home without antihistamines now.

There will be foods which I just won’t take the risk with and that does include some of the thai curries. If I think it might have something I’m allergic to in it, I will weigh up in my mind how close I am to my home, does the restaurant practice good separation in food preparation, how much is an allergic reaction going to ruin the rest of my day?

Maybe I should just stay home and not travel, but I love Asia and I really, really love Asian food. Instead, I take precautions: I nearly always carry an EpiPen with me. I also have a routine I do when I meet new friends or colleagues: I show them where I keep my EpiPen and I say, “Guys, just not through the heart, OK?”

The one and only time I was sick in Japan due to peanut sauce, I downed about 4 antihistamines drunk a lot of water then jumped in a taxi back. There is no way I want to be sick in a restaurant bathroom again! Especially because I tend to fall a sleep straight afterwards and trust me theres almost no where worst you want to fall a sleep. I assume its the antihistamines taking effect but it helps, just like a full sugar pepsi/coke after I wake up. Maybe its the sugar and the goopiness of the cola which helps line the throat and stomach.

I don’t carry an Epipen due to having high blood pressure and idiots watching too much pulp fiction. (not the heart for goodness sake!). Given at the wrong time and I’m dead full stop. I’ve managed to stay alive by being super cautious and its worked for me.

Just because I don’t have an epipen doesn’t mean its less serious by the way. I’ve seen many people instantly think it cant be that bad if I don’t carry an epipen. No I’ve been very fortunate, cautious and suspicious of everything I eat or drink. Trace amounts don’t have enough of a effect fortunately too.

I sometimes cook with small amounts of Soya sauce but give me Tofu and its game over. Likewise I can eat Tuna chunks out of a can but fresh fish will have my body forcefully getting rid of it in the quickest way possible.

I try my best to avoid peanuts, but they lurk in so many dishes. I never order massaman curry, desserts with praline, anything with mole sauce, trail mix, granola or Thai salads. No to anything that even looks like satay, no to exotic alcoholic spirits. All foreign chocolate must be studied meticulously.

Everything is studied heavily by me and if there is no ingredients, I will likely avoid it. This means street food or stuff made on the fly almost impossible. Everyone talks about the street markets of Osaka in Japan but I found it impossible to eat there.

To be honest, although Japan was very tricky. Rules like avoiding all soup/noodle things helped reduce the contact with allergens. I think I would have a even more difficult time in China or Thailand. The pure thought of having to deal with a barrage of allergens makes me not want to go. Something most people barely think about when flying to places. I would love to be one of those people trying different things but its super dicey and not worth the risk, so I avoid them.

The puking bit is actually fine. It’s the waiting bit that is the worst. It’s looking for hives on your tongue and swelling in your lips and wondering, “Is this the stupid mistake that ends my life?”

Puking is the worst I’ve had for a long long time, aka its been a long time since I ended up in hospital. I’m one of the lucky ones where my allergy doesn’t send me straight to hospital. However this should never be dismissed as those hives on my lips and tongue are nothing compared to the endless scratchiness of my throat. Then the swelling and before long its difficult to breath. This is also when I desperately need my inhaler (not something I carry around all the time) but can’t pull enough air through my throat to breath correctly. At that point I realise its all down hill, its the point when I start to make mistakes due to the lack of oxygen going to my brain.

Its scary but I’ve only had a few times when I was much younger and it does mean slowing down and doing less.

I recently had to learn the Polish for peanut, frantically searching for it on Google Translate after carelessly taking a bite of chocolate in my hotel room last summer, although I already knew it was in the chocolate. It was that same ominous tingle on my tongue and my throat, followed by hot fear racing through my body.

Look, I know allergies are boring. While visiting Koh Samui, I mentioned my peanut allergy so much that the Thai staff at my hotel greeted me every morning with, “Hello, Miss No Peanut!”

Its something most people never have to think or deal with. For example I’m writing this on a train from Bristol to Manchester with a change at Birmingham. On the previous train a woman sat eating cashew nuts, then dropped the bag on the ground (litter bug). Now on my last part a woman sits eating a Kitkat peanut across from me. I lean back in my chair but the smell of peanuts is heavy and I dying for her to finish the bar quickly instead of little bites at the edges.

The smell of death just hovers around and it makes you want to run for cover. I’ve drawn comparisons to when someone is smoking in your face, you might be able to deal with it for a short while then you have to move away.

Its something most people never think about but I do all the time! I’m also consciously watching where she touches on the train, to make sure I don’t touch it too.

Allergies are boring I get that, everytime I have to pull my allergy card out at a new restaurant or place. But its deeply dangerous for me and many allergy suffers to underestimate them.

My hope is stories like mine and Jessica will put a human face to the jokes about throwing peanuts at people. Pret’s labelling is just horrible as I found out that the Korean BBQ soup included fish. But I only found that out when asking for the actual legal allergy menu and not trusting the ingredient menu they include in store.

We likely could have had more but the V&A’s maze like design made it very difficult for people to get to our ground stand in time for the 5min tour to the living room experience on the 3rd floor unfortunately. We actually over 200 people signed up via the free eventbrite link.

I personally apologise to everyone who couldn’t find our space on the ground floor or turned up late because of the maze like experience.

Lancaster Uni’s living room primer

The Lancaster’s living room primer using visual perceptive drama to make the point loud and clear. It uses Visual Perceptive Media footage to tell the story of the Break Up, which was written by Julius Amedume back in 2015.

Its quite a playful experience and is much more explicit about what its doing as a whole. This is why I call it a primer for the living room.

The original living room experience in full effect

Showing off the ambient nature of the experience which can be built using the living room framework. It was created with artists from the Western Balkans and Czech republic, and made possible with 3 UK universities Nottingham (databox), Lancaster (iot) and York (obm), FACT Liverpool, the British Council and our successful bid for the Objects of immersion.

It really shows whats possible with something much more abstract than explicit.

The Vostok-K Incident – 3D Spatial Audio demo

We always wanted to use 3D spatial audio in the original living room but we built the living room using similar technology as our timeframe for research was quite different. Its clear we would use S3A in the future. You could imagine a S3A app running on Databox, keeping the same privacy first HDI framework model we pushed earlier on.

Somewhere between getting food and riding Shambhala, I caught a candid shot of this lady sitting on Shambhala’s landscape with a nice pictures of Shambhala in the background. If it wasn’t for Dragon Khan in the background, it would almost seem like a snowy scene in the himalaya?

Digital licensing and ownership has been discussed in the past a lot, back then it was therotical. But its interesting to revisit the discussion in more modern times with the new ecosystems which have become common place.

The digital world has made it much easier to buy and consume entertainment.

Whether it’s a movie, music track, or book, a shiny “buy now” button is usually just a few keystrokes away.

Millions of people have now replaced their physical media collections for digital ones, often stored in the cloud. While that can be rather convenient, it comes with restrictions that are unheard of offline.

This is best illustrated by an analogy I read a few years ago in a research paper by Aaron Perzanowski and Chris Jay Hoofnagle, titled: “What We Buy When We Buy Now.”

The other day my work Dell XPS 13 which has been running Ubuntu 16.04.1 asked me to upgrade. This message has been coming up for a while but I decided it was time for a upgrade, 18.04 was running well on my server and well it was time.

However the upgrade broke and I was left with Ubuntu 18.04 with Busybox. I had backups but as it was a BBC R&D build of Ubuntu, I needed to go to work for them to reinstall it. All of this was just before I went away to Mydata 2018 in Helsinki. On top of that my ubuntu server also had a problem.

It was clear I could reinstall Ubuntu quickly but I would need to do a bunch of configuration and that takes time. I have a task to create a live CD with a bunch of configurations just for me, incase similar happens again.

I’d been looking at Chromebooks since I bought one for my parents ages ago and seen how ChromeOS has matured. I’m not the only one. It was the ability to run Android and Linux apps which pushed to get one.

So I bought the Asus chromebook flip c302, and I’m quite impressed with it. The size is good and the performance is good. As a backup laptop its ideal. It also kinda a solution to my lack of a decent tablet now my Nexus 7 is pretty much dead. I was tempted with the Google Pixelbook but it seemed too close to what the Dell XPS 13 is for.

I did consider getting a second hand XPS and sticking ChromeOS on it myself actually.

Me and my partner decided on Airbnb for our trip to Barcelona. We found one and booked it. Generally the flat was ok,

However there was a warning on the kitchen door, stating they are listening for noise 24 hours a day and will cancel bookings if there is loud noise. Looking around I think the device is this thing…?

It certainly put a terrible taste in our mouth and made us feel uncomfortable. Although we didn’t complain straight away and by the time we thought about it, the internet connection was down and if its really connected and not a poor joke; it was no longer going to work. Didn’t cause the host(s) to come and find out what was wrong, even with us complaining about the lack of internet (I debugged it as much as I could, but ultimately we had European roaming data and wasn’t in the flat that much)

The @Airbnb monitoring system which I was not pleased about at all.Might have changed my mind about booking if I knew I was going to be monitored 24hrs a day 🙁Feels slightly creepy/illegal? pic.twitter.com/2DeKv7Hpzp

Since my tweets/toots and this blog post. I had quite a lot of people and journalists get in touch… But I still have seen nothing from Airbnb or the host. So I decided to take one of the journalists up on their offer in a form of social justice. No idea how what I wrote will come across or be edited but as I was seeking out the legal ramifications of what the host had done, I saw this on the Airbnb help site…

Rules for hosts
If you’re a host and you have any type of surveillance device in or around a listing, even if it’s not turned on or hooked up, we require that you indicate its presence in your House Rules. We also require you to disclose if an active recording is taking place. If a host discloses the device after booking, Airbnb will allow the guest to cancel the reservation and receive a refund. Host cancellation penalties may apply.

With that I rewrote to Airbnb and Airbnbhelp to demand a refund on top of everything else I previously complained about.

Sure to update everyone once I hear something….

Update – Friday 15th Sept

I was contacted by Airbnb by phone, the woman ran through a few questions and we talked about what happened again. She agreed this was clearly a breach of the Airbnb terms and could see the listening device and the warning in a few of the photos (as like me, knew what to look for). She said they would block/ban that listing which they have done. They also issued a refund to me and my partner, which is great news as our un-comfortableness certainly had a slight affect on the holiday in Barcelona.

Personally I’m glad I found the Airbnb term above, as that drove things along much quicker. Previous to that, it seemed not a lot was being done?

To summarize, we will follow up and investigate the host’s account following your report of a surveillance device in the listing. We take these reports very seriously, once again, thank you for bringing this issue to our attention. Your participation helps keep Airbnb a safe and trusted community.

First time was from Gregor Žavcer at MyData 2018 in Helsinki. I remember when he started saying if you have no control over your identity you are but a slave (power-phased of course). There was a bit of awe from the audience, including myself. Now to be fair he justified everything he said but I didn’t make note of the references he made, as he was moving quite quickly. I did note down something about no autonomy is data without self.

This looks incredible as we shift closer to the Dweb (I’m thinking there was web 1.0, then web 2.0 and now Dweb, as web 3.0/semantic web didn’t quite take root). There are many questions including service/application support and the difficulty of getting one. This certainly where I agree with Aral about the design of this all, the advantages could be so great but if it takes extremely good technical knowledge to get one, then its going to be stuck on the ground for a long time, regardless of the critical advantages.